Approx 2600 words
© 2016-2023 James E. McCormack
/ Procyon Works LLC
The northern sky of modern astronomy is filled with heroes of ancient Greece.
How did this come to pass?
Knowledge of the stars was commonplace thousands of years ago. Their risings and settings tracked the seasons of the year; their motion in the dark hours marked the passing of the night. (See Practical Stars [LINK].)
For all this to work, though, the stars had to have names that everybody knew. To that end, every human culture has defined and named particular asterisms, constellations, and individual stars. The naming of the stars is a culturally ‘sticky’ thing; it’s hard to change something that everybody knows.
Difficult – but not impossible.
So how did the stars become Greek?
Let’s think this through.
We begin at the beginning. The Greeks didn’t exist as a people, a culture until the early second millennium BCE. Reasoning that Greek constellations can’t exist without Greeks, we conclude that the Greek stars were defined sometime after 2000, maybe 1900 BCE at the very earliest.
Framing things on the other end, the oldest surviving Greek writings cite constellations well known today. There are several references to stars and constellations in the works of Homer and Hesiod – all of them figures still familiar today, such as Orion, and the Pleiades, and the Great Bear. Although we don’t have a comprehensive starguide from this early era, all mentions of stars in surviving works in ancient Greek and Latin cite figures known today.
There’s also a dog that doesn’t bark in the night: we have no records of major new constellations being created during the literate classical period. There’s one instance of a new constellation declared by imperial decree — and ignored by astronomers [LINK]. And the story of Hercules being placed in the stars gives evidence that the sky was full, and resistant to change.
The Greek constellations were well established before 800 – 750 BCE. Except for a few changes of identity suggested by Roman poets, the stars are the stars are the stars from the time when the stars were renamed by the Greeks.
So. Sometime between 1900 and 800 BCE the ancient Greeks replaced a previous set of constellations with star-figures of their own.
We say ‘replaced’, presuming that the people of Crete and the peoples of the southern Balkans had constellations of their own, long before the appearance of the Greek-speaking horseriders.
Let’s restate our question, accounting for the cultural ‘stickiness’ of star-lore.
Instead of asking ‘when did the Greeks put their stars in the sky?’, we ought to ask,
‘when would it have been possible for the Greeks to change the stars?’
To address this, we need to know something of the origins of the Greeks.
Here, a brief history in five acts:
I. Before 2000 BCE a mixed culture had developed in the southernmost region of what today we call the Balkans, including elements of agricultural practices (grain and livestock) which spread out of Anatolia, commingled with the knowledge of indigenous fishers and hunter-gatherers of the region. Settlements arose in areas suitable for farming or herding; along the coast, towns grew around reliable freshwater sources. Maritime skills evolved from simple dugouts and rafts to increasingly sophisticated vessels crafted for fishing or for trade. Islands in the Cyclades capable of supporting a community had been settled. An important presence in the region were the Minoans of Crete, who developed a distinct palace-centered culture; they were advanced in agriculture, navigation, architecture and the visual arts. (We call them Minoans, but we don’t know what they called themselves.)
II. Around 1900 BCE, nomads with roots in the eastern steppes (modern Kazakhstan) arrived in the Balkans on horseback, speaking an early form of Greek; they quickly established themselves as a ruling class. The newcomers didn’t arrive in large numbers, but as the only horseriders around, they were able to impose themselves upon the locals. This was not an invasion, in the military sense; more like an invasive species, introduced into a new habitat. By maintaining a monopoly on equestrian capability for a generation or two, the horseriders were able to maintain and consolidate their power. The cultural dynamic, we suspect, was akin to a mob operation, a protection racket, the sort of rule which ensues when one group holds a significant martial advantage over another.
The Minoans were also an influence on the Greeks of this period. Archaeologic finds in the western- and southern-most Balkans seem to be derivative of the palace architecture of the Minoans. The people of Crete had long engaged in trade with farmers and fishers of the mainland, and may have settled among the locals.
This scenario aligns well with recent genetic analyses of ancient remains from ancient Greek, Minoan and
Cycladic peoples, which reports that ‘Mycenaeans can be modeled as a mixture in an ~1:10 ratio of a Yamnaya-like steppe-derived population and a Minoan- or Early Bronze Age-like population’. See Lazarides et al, ‘A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia.’ Science 377: 940-51 (26 Aug 2022), along with commentary by Arbuckle and Schwandt, ‘Ancient genomes and West Eurasian history’, Science 377: 922-3.
The horseriders also brought with them the core of what we know as Olympian religion, centered around Poseidon and Hestia.
Originally a horse-god, Poseidon evolved into a god of ships and the sea (and horses), as the horse-riders transformed themselves from nomads to landlords and sailors.
Hestia, remembered today as goddess of the hearth, likely began as goddess of flame. In a nomadic culture, the ability to transport embers over long distances, the ability to conjure fresh flame from dry tinder – these were skills of vital importance to a traveling band. But as the nomadic riders settled down to village life, Hestia’s power waned; if one’s own home-fire died out, embers were almost always available from neighbors.
Over the course of a century or so, a new culture emerged in the southern Balkans: the Greeks of Poseidon.
III. Around 1500 BCE, a Zeus-cult arose in the region of Arcadia and surrounds. This new, re-booted Olympian religion took root in the palaces of the Argolid: Argos, Tiryns, and Mycenae. Before this time the early Greeks had been close to the Minoans; the Mycenaeans changed that forever. The Argolid became an increasingly important center of trade, and a powerful naval and military force. Sometime around 1400 BCE, the culture of the Myceneans came to dominate the Greek-speaking world, and the culture of the Minoans was erased. (Evidence for how this happened is unclear, but a quick look at human history suggests that this was probably an act of genocide.)
IV. In the following centuries, the Mycenaeans were a dominant maritime presence in the AEgean, with ports and settlements across the Cyclades to the island of Rhodes, and occasional colonies along the Ionian coast and the Cilacian coast, where they might have bumped into the Hittites. They also traded in Phoenicia and other ports of the eastern Mediterranean coast, an international marketplace where goods transported by camel or ass were traded for goods delivered by ship.
Near the beginning of the 12th century BCE, the eastern Mediterranean and surrounding regions saw a general collapse of palace-centers and major temples, affecting Egypt, Greece, the Levant. The cause of this collapse is unclear; climate fluctuation, slow-acting viruses and other factors may have been involved. However it happened, in the absence of centers of wealth, people still farmed and fished and traded, and life went on.
V. During this ‘dark age’, a new technology of iron smelting developed, enabled by the growing availability of coal and charcoal. Around 800-750 BCE, Greek traders adopted an alphabet from Phoenician traders, and the rest is history.
Given this progression, the most obvious opportunity for the introduction of new Greek constellations was around 1400-1350 BCE, after the displacement of the Minoans by the Mycenaeans.
Here’s what we know or can reasonably infer:
Master mariners of their time, the Minoans would have known how to navigate using the stars. Further, as practitioners of Anatolian-style agriculture, we infer that the Minoans would have used the heliacal rising and setting of sentinel stars to track the seasons. Some of the Minoan sky might have derived from Anatolian tradition. The inhabitants of the Greek mainland and the Cyclades may have had their own stars, or they might have shared the stars of the Minoans.
The incoming horseriders must have had stars of their own when they arrived. But while they were easily able to take charge politically, culturally it would have been much easier to adapt to local custom, on several fronts. The newcomers probably adopted many of the star figures of the locals, perhaps adding a few of their own. (The Horse, for instance, is obviously a constellation of horseriders.) But in large part, we’d guess, the early Greeks likely adopted Balkan and/or Minoan constellations.
But with the erasure of Minoan civilization, the Bronze Age Greeks had reason and opportunity to rename the sky.
What was the process like? We propose that this was not a matter of folk tradition which developed organically, but a deliberate political process which happened at a critical junction in early Greek history. As evidence, we note that many of the northern constellations are tied to Greek identity, or particular regions of Greece. Pegasus, the horse, didn’t always have wings, but has always been a horse – an important figure to the horse-riders. Orion is a bronze-age hero of Boeotia, a region anchored by a palace-center at Thebes. Auriga is a hero of old Athens, a palace-center of Attica. All of this is consistent with the premise that these constellations were defined by the Bronze Age Greeks.
And then we have The Rescue of Andromeda. In the evening sky of autumn, we find Perseus (carrying the head of Medusa), flying toward Andromeda, chained to a cliff by the side of the stellar ocean, the sea-monster Cetus threatening to the south, as her parents, Cassiopeia and Cepheus, look on from the north. This is not a set of five individual constellations, but instead a tableau, a particular scene from a particular story traced upon the stars. There’s nothing else quite like it in the modern sky.
This set of constellations, we suggest, is not a matter a folk tradition, but instead an act of state.
To modern listeners, the rescue of Andromeda is an epic tale, with our hero rescuing the princess by slaying the sea-monster. But in the context of what was happening around the 14th century BCE, the story of Perseus and Medusa would have been understood as a tale of the rise of the children of Zeus, and the displacement of the Minoans and their Snake-goddess, an oral history which has devolved into allegory. As depicted in the sky, this scene touches on three great stories of the period:
- Perseus holds the head of Medusa in a carrying-bag, a reminder of the displacement of the Minoans by the children of Zeus
- Perseus’ slaying the monster of Poseidon reflects the ascendance of the Zeus-cult within Greek culture
- Perseus’ marriage to Andromeda aligns Mycenae with the children of Belus and Agenor
Genealogies are shorthand for history in many mythologies. It seems that being part of the family of Belus and Agenor was a big thing, at the time; the early Greeks invented more than one story connecting them to this lineage. This lineage is not just a storyteller’s entertainment; it’s an expression of state propaganda, celebrating the ascendance of Zeus among the Olympian gods, and the rise of the Mycenaean Greeks as a power to be reckoned with in the Mediterranean basin.
The stars chosen to represent Perseus give evidence that expert astronomers astronomers were involved in the shaping of the Greek constellations. (See The Eye of Horus [LINK].)
With Perseus of the Argolid, Orion of Boeotia, and Auriga of Athens, it’s easy to imagine the Greek re-naming of the northern constellations as a Bronze Age treaty written in the stars.
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Myth as History
The stories we know as Greek myth are an amalgam of tales from several eras. Some are as old as the Bronze Age, popular stories from a preliterate age, which survived long enough to be put in writing. These earliest stories began as cultural memories, detailed oral histories which, over generations, devolved into allegorical tales. The early literate age captured many of these old stories on papyrus; later, literacy enabled new styles of storytelling and poetry.
In the preliterate era, singers and storytellers were spreaders of news, and keepers of an oral history. Many of the myths which survive from this period are versions of what once were histories. Some of them histories as the throne would have them known; some of them tales embellished for entertainment value by itinerant singers at village common-houses.
An example: The stories of Perseus place him in the 15th or 14th century BCE. He was a hero of the Argolid, a major power-center of mainland Greece at the time. His parents were Zeus, chief deity of the new Olympian cult, and Danae, a princess of Argos (trigger alert: rape); thus, Perseus was born a demigod, and heir to the throne of Argos. The death of Medusa is a tale of the son of Zeus killing a snake-goddess, which can easily be read as an allegorical memory of the sacking of Crete by the Mycenaeans. (A well-known Minoan icon is the Snake Goddess, often depicted as a well-skirted, unshirted, fabulously-hatted goddess, a writhing snake held tight in each of her outstretched hands. Greek storytellers, we infer, transformed her to Medusa.) At the end of his adventures he became king of Argos; was later king of Tiryns; and finally moved on to found the palace of Mycenae – each of the three major palace-centers of the Argolid laid claim to Perseus. The stories of Perseus nicely align with what archaeology tells us of the history of Bronze Age Greece.
In approaching any story from ‘Greek Mythology®’, it helps to think about when that tale first was told, by whom, and why.
Before the invention of writing, most storytelling served as history, a means of preserving cultural memories of Those Who Came Before. Storytellers embellished the telling of recent events, and older histories devolved into fantastic allegorical narratives. Though details are distorted by the vagaries of individual and cultural memory, a lot of preliterate mytholgy is rooted in accounts of actual events.
In a literate society, with written accounts and inventories and histories and genealogies, manuscript texts filled the role of cultural memory, freeing storytellers to explore new sorts of narrative. Novel forms of poetry evolved, and an explosion of fiction – stories not rooted in history, but shaped in full by the storyteller. The notion of ‘authorship’ emerged. And the use of written scripts allowed for the evolution of theater from simple displays of pantomime and dance to a rich new literary art.
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Zodiac
We deal with the adoption of the Zodiac separately. [LINK]